Roumina Parsa

Roumina Parsa is an Iranian-Australian writer based in Melbourne/ Naarm. She appeared in the 2024 Emerging Writers’ Festival, was shortlisted for the 2022 Catalyse Nonfiction Prize, and her work has previously featured in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Meanjin and more.
 
 

 
 
 
 
The internet has a beating heart and it goes to the rhythm of –

When you don’t open an app for a while it will gain sentience. I tried taking a week off of social media and got to five days (also a working week for the unemployed) and each day my phone came more alive talking that internet language:

Redacted and 64 other accounts you follow have posted on Instagram. Redacted uploaded a story on Facebook. Redacted recently shared a new reel. Do you know redacted? Do you want to sync redacted from your contacts? Do you want to follow redacted? Do you want to hold redacted’s hand and tell them your secrets and braid each other’s hair?

It reminds me of when I was 12 and had my first blow of agoraphobia, though I didn’t know then that’s what it was, an event made up of no understanding and all experience. The suddenly inability to go to school, to sleep alone, to exist as a human how I had before. It was all very dramatic. My parents were forced to worry about me in a way they’d never needed to and it didn’t suit any of us well.

I had to go see the school counsellor who sat me down and said much of the same as my apps; that my friends were making new friends, and things were changing, and I was being left behind. At 12 you can’t know what that all means. The passage of time, the concept of things moving on without you. It just sounds like being dead. And what’s a 12 year old supposed to do with that? What’s the threat of time passing when you can only perceive forever?

The counsellor was too old and too mean to change me anyway. So far removed from the quietness of a child’s defiance to understand it was only made of fear, all the way through.

Is that what you want? For all your friends to forget about you? She’d asked.
Oh brother, I’d thought, my stomach hurts.

In abstinence from the apps my hands grew idle and my mind quiet from the voices of others and I felt again in an old way what it meant to be singular. At the centre of your own world but on the periphery of that great other, where everything was happening and where you were not. It made me think of Bane and his monologue in the Dark Knight Rises – him telling Batman how he was born in a pit, and that made him one with the darkness on a level that
Batman never could be; he who chose it. I couldn’t decide which one I was, Bane or Batman – the chosen or the chooser of the deep dark.

The apps pierced through: are you sure you don’t know redacted?

I didn’t know redacted. I knew my whispering girl on YouTube, the only app I decided to keep using, staying away from the comments and the shorts. I have a premium account on it that I worked real hard for, downloading a proxy to connect to Turkey where I could get it cheaper so someone could whisper-read me a book and tap on its cover as I fell asleep without an ad interrupting.

[I do often consider what my ancestors must think of me, the rotten fruit of their labours. All those soldiers and mothers and otherwise wounded warriors looking down at all this (I’m pointing, round and round, at my many comforts) and seeing someone crouching beneath a tall ceiling, collapsing under the weight of nothing. It’s fine though, really, and if it’s not I can bring the ceilings down lower, and if my ancestors hate that too – well, what can any of us do for the aches of the dead?]

My whispering girl only chooses books I’m pretentious enough to think are stupid, lending themselves so easily to boredom and the eyes closing. She’s younger than me but/ and pregnant and has started inviting everyone to take a deep breath with her at the beginning of her videos. Naturally, I comply. Thinking, nothing is happening and maybe that’s it.

I started wondering though if anyone from my apps missed me. If anyone had even noticed I’d been gone. What was the weight of one person’s absence? What was the sound withheld from the collective of voices? I knew what I was asking was much bigger, the tiniest babushka doll in the set of worries I was too defiant to open.

For those who’ve seen it, you know Bane’s monologue ends on this, a note of defiance. But maybe you hear the fear also, all the way through, when he says: I didn’t see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!

When I log into my apps again it’s to see the photos my friends had posted of us – the friends the counsellor had long ago threatened I’d lose. They picked the ugliest ones but it’s fine because I’m in them, because I was there. Because I wasn’t born here; not in this darkness, not in this pit, not even in this country. I was brought here by a patchwork of choices, made by and for me, and that’s the least important part actually. The darkness doesn’t belong to me, or to you. It holds no loyalties, it promises no victories. It denounces itself with its own emptiness. It falters with what it means to use as a threat; some substance of the very end.

That’s only for the dead though, for us alive and itching and and online and pleading, it is still redacted.

Rochelle Pickles

Rochelle Pickles is a writer, editor and non-practising psychologist from Boorloo, currently living and writing on unceded Gadigal land. Her work has been published in the anthologies Soak and Our Selves by Brio Books and Night Parrot Press. Rochelle has an MA in Creative Writing and she is working on a novel.

 

 

Centipede

An eruption of sound wakes her from sleep, relentless and familiar. It takes her a moment in dream to decipher the feeling of panic, like the crackle of an oiled frypan before bursting into unexpected flame.

Something then sinks in her, and she reaches out a hand to press the snooze button on the alarm, knowing she doesn’t have time to snooze. 

In the shower the anxiety grips hardest—staring at the back of the bathtub thinking of all the clients for the day, all the problems to solve. 

He’s asleep in their bed as she stands naked before the wardrobe, staring at all of the worthless pieces of fabric she’s expected to put on her body every day and pretend to be a person. All too stiff, too tight, too colourful. She doesn’t want any of it on her. After fifteen minutes of staring, she selects the same thing she wore yesterday. She paints her face and puts a headband on so she won’t have to brush her hair. He inches an eye open and looks at her reflection in the mirror.

‘Beautiful,’ he says reassuringly, knowing her mind.

She moves her mouth into a smile but the part of her that would feel something knocks hollow in her chest. She kisses him on the head and picks up her handbag to leave.

* * *

Quinn was late to the appointment, her foundation sweating off as she walk-ran down the street. 

Arriving at the front door of the building, she stood for a moment to take a deep breath before pushing the doors open. She hated that her therapist might think her disorganised. 

Deanna was walking breezily towards her in creaseless lilac linen before Quinn even finished checking in with the receptionist. She was in her early fifties and always wore flowing outfits and beaded sandals. She smiled warmly and said,

‘Morning, Quinn. That’s a lovely outfit. Would you like a cup of tea?’

Quinn made a brief calculation, determining whether the additional time waiting for tea to be made was worth the dent in therapy time she needed to work out how make it through another day. She said yes and wiped the sweat from the bridge of her nose. They settled into the plush cream couches and Deanna rested her notebook on her knee. She looked up, expectedly. 

Fifty minutes later, Quinn exited Deanna’s office puffy-eyed, paid and walked back to her car. She twisted the rear-view mirror to check her face and reapply the washed-off layer of mascara. Quinn checked her watch—another hour until work. Taking another deep breath, she turned the key in the ignition.

Quinn liked to arrive early. She greeted Joy at reception with their usual nod and a tight-lipped ‘hang loose’ hand gesture before checking the roster for which room she’d be in today. She adjusted the lighting in Room 4 to how she liked it and took the framed photography piece off the wall, the one with the little girl cuddling her mum on a sunlit couch. Robyn, the director, thought it represented what their service was supposed to provide: safety, connection. Within a month of working there Quinn had a client walk in the room, look at that photograph and stroll right back out. Quinn thought: exactly. She’d taken it down every day since but made sure it was back up between sessions, so Robyn didn’t find out. There was a little nail on the naked wall and sometimes clients commented on it, when they wanted to avoid talking about the thing that they actually needed to talk about. Why don’t you put a picture there? they asked. Quinn got tired of thinking up excuses and started to ask them how the naked wall made them feel.

Quinn scanned her client list for the day—Robyn had asked Joy at reception to squeeze in a couple more to fill the cancellations, and Quinn’s monthly direct supervision session had also been mysteriously replaced by a paying customer again. She sighed again and took out a pen. Her therapist had suggested that taking time to write out brief session plans at the start of her workday might help defer her ruminations over session preparation in every other waking hour. 

Seven clients back-to-back. A 5-year-old boy forced to attend because his mother didn’t want to address her own anxiety: get out the crayons, allow extra time for an unofficial session during parent feedback. A 22-year-old man with social anxiety who mostly likes to chat about how great he is with women: review therapy goals to get us back on track. A new client—a 28-year-old woman with a loss of interest in daily activities, unable to stop crying, lack of energy, wanting to sleep all day: get some depression tip-sheets ready. Quinn also wrote—burnout?—then put a line through it because she was probably projecting. A nonbinary teen refusing to go back to school with possible post-traumatic stress disorder from a bullying incident, a new mother adjusting to life with a baby, a 46-year-old woman processing the grief of her mother’s death, and a 9-year-old girl who melts down every time there’s a change in plans.

Quinn took a deep breath in for four, held for four, and breathed out for six.

She looked up at the clock. It was time. She heard the mother of 5-year-old boy ask to see the psychologist.

Quinn closed the door after her second client—22-year-old man with social anxiety—and checked the clock. She had five minutes to write the notes.

NAME disclosed that from 6 years of age, his REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED. When he tried to go to REDACTED for help, the REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED. At 11 years old he disclosed this to a teacher and he recalls child protection services visiting the home to speak to his mother, though claims were dismissed following the visit and REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED. He did not make any further disclosures and left the family home at 16 years of age. He has discussed this with a previous psychologist since that time but continues to experience REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED.

She glanced back up at the clock, her body shaking after fighting to keep it steady for the last half hour. Had she done everything right, said everything right? Did anyone need to be notified? Would he be ok until next week? What if he got spooked and never comes back? She didn’t work with serious complex trauma like this—she knew she needed to refer him to someone who did. But he had been coming for weeks and it had taken him this long to trust her enough to share the thing. It always felt like a punishment, this professional deferment of personal vulnerabilities. Quinn looked down at the plan she had written for the session—neatly attached to the front of her clipboard before a series of frenzied notes. Of course there no way to plan, no real way to prepare.

She was late for the next appointment and there was a gentle tap on the door from Joy. Quinn poked her head out, nodded and said to send the next client through. She moved away from the door and breathed in four, held for four, and breathed out for six. 

28-year-old woman was dressed in navy linen and low heels, her long smooth hair falling down her shoulders. She was casual chic, dressed like she could either head to the office or collapse on the couch at a moment’s notice. Quinn looked down at her own outfit, suddenly concerned they were matching. 

Quinn greeted the new client with the warmest smile and invited her to sit down. She checked the confidentiality papers and started with the usual.

‘Tell me a little bit about what’s brought you here today.’

The woman took a deep breath. ‘I’m just…I feel like I’m losing myself, forgetting what it’s like to be me? If that makes sense. My work is…quite stressful. I think about it all the time. But I’m also starting to…not care. I just want to sleep all day. I feel so sad all the time. I think I’m a shit person. So…yeah.’ She gave a little laugh that pushed tears to her eyes.

Quinn smiled gently, adjusting her clipboard on her lap and circling the crossed-out burnout. ‘What do you do for work?’

‘I’m a psychologist.’

Quinn froze her smile in place, nodding and lifting her notes to check the paperwork again. No mention. 

‘What field are you in?’

‘Private practice. Adults, mostly.’

Quinn noticed that she had not stopped nodding and forced her head still.

‘She didn’t even tell the receptionist, at intake?’  

It was Saturday morning and busier than usual in their favourite spot. Quinn shook her head at her friend. ‘I was totally unprepared. I’ve never treated another psych before.’

‘I have,’ Em said, yanking her arms off the table to allow the waiter to place down her eggs. ‘I was freaking out the whole time. Like, are you watching me work? Are you like, “why are you mixing ACT with CBT? Where’s the schemas, bitch?”’ 

Em laughed at her own joke and shoved a whole egg in her mouth in one. She ate with the velocity of a contestant in a hot-dog competition. 

‘Right?’ Quinn sawed at a slice of sourdough toast with a blunt butter knife. ‘I kept subtly asking her about her background but all I really wanted to know is, “are you better than me at this?”’

Em nodded, the loose bun on her head bobbing as she grinned without reply because her mouth was full again.

‘And she’s basically describing me,’ Quinn continued. ‘It’s like I’m listening to myself. She can’t get the things out of her head, she thinks she’s shit at her job, she gets no decent supervision. She’s always anxious that she’s not doing it right, or not doing enough, but she’s also losing that capacity for empathy, and she’s lost all interest in stuff she used to enjoy.’

Em creased her eyebrows. ‘You okay, love?’

Quinn gave up on the toast and pierced a cherry tomato, keeping her eyes on her plate. ‘I’m getting some therapy. It’s helping a little.’

Em reached out and squeezed her forearm across the table. ‘I’m sorry, lovely. You know you can call me any time.’

Quinn knew she could, but adding more unpaid therapy to her friend’s full caseload didn’t feel right either. She knew Em had been struggling too. ‘I know.’

 ‘What would you have done, if you’d known beforehand?’ Em asked.

Quinn thought about it. ‘Talked to my psych about being a psych that feels insecure about treating another psych?’

‘Oh yeah. Same, probably.’ Em finished the last scraps from her plate, running a finger over the leftover sauces before popping it in her mouth. 

‘My psych is so good,’ Quinn sighed. ‘I keep stealing her stuff to do with my own clients.’

‘If the new psych-client is just like you, it’s a direct transfer!’

Quinn groaned. ‘Maybe I should just refer her to the source?’

Em rolled her eyes. ‘I know you feel shit about yourself right now but you’re a great psych, Quinnie. You care and you do right by them.’

Quinn shook herself to avoid getting teary. ‘Well, so do you. I don’t know how you do what you do.’ 

And because they were both psychologists, bound as if by blood in ethical code, Em recounted in a low voice the thing that a client had shared with her that week that kept her awake at night, unable to erase the image from her head. Quinn absorbed the thing and later that night when she closed her eyes to sleep, she couldn’t shake the image too. She wanted to tell her boyfriend—clinging to him next to her in the bed for distraction—but even if she could, she knew the thing was too big for a regular person to hold, to contextualise with all of the other things. And so she held it, like a deeply-drawn breath, along with all the other things from that day, and the weeks, and the years, until she fell asleep.

Dan paused the TV as Quinn walked into the room.

It was Sunday night and she was wrapped in a towel after her bath, trying to ease the anxiety of returning to work tomorrow. She sat down on the couch and cuddled into him. She knew he’d been watching a horror movie she couldn’t handle, but the image on the screen seemed innocuous.

‘Did that help?’ he asked, referring to the bath.

‘A little.’

‘Need me to get you anything?’

‘No, it’s ok.’

He switched the TV back to free-to-air. There was a story about Australia’s mental health crisis: not enough professionals in the field to meet the needs of the public, a steeply rising prevalence in anxiety and depression, the long-term risks of an expanding need going unmet. The premier announced that more places will be made available in courses and degrees to pump out more professionals—they assured viewers that hundreds more psychologists, social workers, youth workers and mental health nurses would be fed into the education, health and public sectors within the next few years. 

Quinn watched on, expressionless. ‘I think I’d prefer the horror movie.’

‘Oh shit, sorry.’ Dan changed the channel. ‘I was thinking about something else.’

‘Tell me what you’re thinking about,’ she said, always calmed by the straight-forward linearity of his thoughts. 

He laughed too loudly. ‘I was thinking about how you would medically attach someone’s mouth to another person’s butthole.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘It’s in the movie I was watching!’

‘It better be in the movie you were watching.’

‘My mind was just still on it.’

‘The logistics.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Hmm. What’s this one called?’

Human Centipede.’

‘Well, now you have to tell me what it’s about.’

The next week, Quinn sat in the waiting room of her psychologist’s office, early this time to prove herself.

Deanna came to collect her in the same routine as always: the warm smile, the offer of tea, the nestling into the cushions on the couch, the notebook, the expectant look.

Quinn told her about the client psychologist.

‘What’s the big deal?’ she asked. ‘You come to see me!’

Quinn laughed uneasily and grabbed a cushion to cuddle. She didn’t know how to explain to Deanna that she was a real psychologist and Quinn wasn’t.

‘She isn’t much younger than me. She’s describing a lot of the same things I find hard. I ended up repeating things that you said to me when I first started coming here—things that helped. But I also felt like this…fraud. How can I sit there and act like I believe that she can get better, that she’s right to stay in this job despite all the ways it’s breaking her down, if I’m also struggling with those same things, and I don’t know if I’m right for the job, or if I’ll ever feel better?’

Deanna sighed. ‘Do you think she’ll start to feel better, with help?’

Quinn nodded. ‘It’s always easier for me to believe that they can get better, than it is for me to believe that I can.’

‘Because you put everyone else before yourself.’

They’d discussed it. ‘I guess, yeah.’

‘You’re not a fraud if you struggle sometimes, Quinn. You’re allowed to feel however you feel and your experiences in therapy help make you a good therapist. What would you prefer, your therapist having no idea what it’s like to feel anxious? To feel depressed?’

Quinn shrugged. She was the same as everybody; she was desperate to know what suburb Deanna lived in, who her family were, what she ate for breakfast—but she didn’t want to know who she was or how she felt, not really.

Deanna leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘Let me tell you something. We don’t all have it together as much as we let on. Even I see a psych sometimes.’

Quinn took this in, leaning back in her chair for a moment. ‘Have you ever heard of this movie, Human Centipede?’ she finally asked.

Deanna suffered an accidental furrow of the brow at the unexpected change in subject. She corrected her expression. ‘Oh—I think I’ve heard of it, yes?’

‘It’s about these two girls who go on a road trip in Europe, their car gets a flat tire, and they seek help from a stranger—a medical professional. But the surgeon doesn’t help them, he kidnaps them and degrades them in this unimaginable way. He’s fixated on this idea of making the world’s first human centipede; joining humans through their gastric systems. Everything they take in has to go out through someone else.’

Deanna shifted in her seat slightly.

‘I’m sorry,’ Quinn jumped in, ‘It’s so gross. I don’t even watch horror. Just something about the idea of this human centipede struck me, you know?’

Her therapist leaned forward. ‘Why do you think that is?’

Quinn hesitated. ‘Well…do you ever think…that’s what we’re like?’

Deanna blinked. ‘I’m sorry?’

* * *

An eruption of sound wakes her. She reaches out a hand to press the snooze button on the alarm, knowing she doesn’t have time to snooze. 

In the shower she stares at the back of the bathtub, her mind sifting through every possible scenario, everything that wasn’t done well enough or could be better. Techniques, strategies, diagrams, resources, advice. 

She puts on the same thing she wore yesterday. Different scarf, different headband. 

He looks up at her from the bed, his smile apologetic in its reassurance. She kisses him on the cheek and picks up her handbag.

She’s early to arrive at the office and sits down to write a plan. Then she looks up at the clock—it’s time. She can see it now, ahead of her, grey steel protruding—the endless pipe of things. Can see herself, giving her first warm smile of the day, before attaching her mouth to the receiving end, turning the dial to start the flow. And she drinks, and drinks, and drinks.

Her thoughts are interrupted by voices outside the door. She hears the first client of the day—they are ready to see the psychologist.

*

Angela Costi reviews Witness by Louise Milligan

Witness

by Louise Milligan

ISBN: 9780733644634

Hachette

Reviewed by Angela Costi
 
 
The Trauma of Trial for Survivors of Crime

Traditionally, an investigative journalist provides an in-depth analysis of a matter or issue of public concern without having experienced the problem being uncovered. This is not the case in Witness. In Louise Milligan’s book there is a merging of non-fiction and memoir as Milligan shares her personal experience of being called as a witness in the trial of George Pell. The detailed interviews with a vast cross-range of participants and players in the judicial system, together with the lived experience of the author, provide an absorbing account of being a witness within a criminal trial process. Witness is an invaluable addition to the well-spring of accounts by survivors of crime, advocacy agencies and law reform bodies seeking to reappraise the legal system’s treatment of witnesses in sexual offence matters.

We are introduced to the legal process through the journey of the survivor and note the number of people involved, including the police officer, the prosecutor, the defence lawyer, the judicial officer, the social worker (Witness Assistance Service) … But their roles are contained or constrained according to regulation and practice, which further adversely impacts survivors. We come to understand that the victim of a sexual crime has a compromised role from the moment they report the crime to the police, and during the legal proceedings instigated – they are “a witness”, which involves being cross-examined. This adversarial process entails the prosecution lawyer and defence lawyer going into ‘battle’, the former to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt and the latter to create doubt within the collective mind of the jury. It’s an anomaly (or an apathy) of the criminal adversarial system that requires a victim of a sexual crime to be a witness to the crime itself in the proceedings. A daunting and traumatic task. Milligan’s account of the cross-examination process shows how “blunt and brutal” it is for the survivor who is also treated as a witness.

Milligan provides transcripts of questions posed by defence lawyers where in order to garner a seed of doubt for their client’s case, they are prepared to override courtesy and respect. Some of the cross-examination tactics used include humiliating the survivor with particular tones, such as ones associated with derision or incredulity, using double-negative questions to deliberately confuse, “asking so-called ‘tag questions’ phrased in the negative – ‘he didn’t do it, did he?’” and being preoccupied with graphic and unnecessary details of the crime to garner emotive reactions for tactical advantage. As Milligan states, the impact on survivors is as bad as the crime itself:

Certainly, for the countless survivors of sexual crimes I have spoken to over the past few years, there is one commonality that stands out perhaps more than any other: to be disbelieved and disrespected in a courtroom when you are reliving a terrible event from when you are a child, or a vulnerable young woman, cuts people to the bone. I’ve spoken to people who have abandoned the process because the undermining that inevitably occurs is just too much. And to people whose loved ones killed themselves before the process of assassinating their characters was over. (21-22)

Milligan brings this heart-breaking statement home through an extensive account of what happened to two survivors. Firstly, we meet Saxon Mullins. Reflective and resilient Saxon Mullins speaking her truth despite a harrowing, “dehumanising” cross-examination experience. We learn of her ordeal in the alleyway, her courage to report, the five years of back and forth in court, how the conviction by a jury was appealed against by the well-resourced accused, Luke Lazarus. The matter was eventually left in legal limbo as the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal found that the judge erred in her decision (by failing to consider steps taken by the accused to determine consent) however, a retrial wasn’t allowed. This understandably sparked a public response for reforming the consent laws with the NSW Attorney-General, Mark Speakman, stating:

Look, it’s not a satisfactory outcome for a complainant to go through four hearings, two trials, two appeals, and in the end the accused has to be let go because we’ve had the judicial process going on too long. (135)

Milligan provides an intriguing post-trial interview with Ian Lloyd QC, the defence counsel for Luke Lazarus. She ventures into wanting to understand the personal motivations, emotional intelligence and empathetic awareness of defence advocates in sexual crime matters. Is there a “cognitive dissonance” that enables them to execute demoralising questions to survivors? She concludes:

From our discussions, I can see Ian Lloyd wants me to know that he has a heart. And he does. He empathises with these women and children who come before him with their awful stories. It is, by his own admission, ‘a very difficult process defending these guys’. (37-38)

Through her insightful interviews with defence barristers, Milligan asks us to consider questions such as: What type of system allows defence lawyers to feel comfortable transgressing the few in-built checks contained in section 41 of the Evidence Act regarding improper questions? What type of system allows defence lawyers to be at ease with and resort to unrestrained “bullying” or unchallenged “rape myths”? Milligan unravels these sorts of issues with various law reform and complaints personnel, including the Legal Services Commissioner, Fiona McLeay, who agrees that there is a long, long road towards change of this nature. As Milligan states:

In my hundreds of conversations with survivors over the past few years, I don’t think any of them have ever mentioned going through any sort of complaints process about what they endured in court. I get the feeling most of them would have no idea that the mechanism exists. And even if they did, they’re generally just too spent. (95)

Paris Street is the other survivor we come to know well in Witness. We are provided with an extensive account of his multiple ordeals: sexual grooming by a senior coach, Peter Kehoe, when he was a fifteen-year-old student at a private boys’ school; being harshly cross-examined by Robert Richter QC; actively “unsupported” by his school as they sided with the coach; writing an honest letter to Robert Richter about how:

I live with a scar in my mind from your cross-examination. (289)

Paris Street shared both this letter with Milligan and the disappointing response he received from Robert Richter. This exchange only served to compound the despondency and the futile wish for hope that there could be some acknowledgement, some change, so that a teenager’s experience of cross-examination isn’t another form of abuse.

However, many of the barristers interviewed by Milligan argue that the “pendulum has swung too far in favour of complainants.” To counter this, Milligan reminds us of the statistics born from studies of sexual assaults being reported to police and those being pursued in court:

An analysis by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald newspapers of sexual assault statistics published in September 2019 found that of the 52,396 sexual assaults reported to NSW Police between 2009 and 2018, charges were only laid in 12,894 cases.

Of the 12,894, 7,629 went to court. Of those, 2308 were dropped at trial, 1494 found not guilty. The remaining 3827, or roughly 50 per cent of the total that went to court, were found guilty. That’s just 7 per cent of the cases that originally went to the police. (104)

Throughout Witness, we are reminded of this vast disconnect between the priorities of the adversarial system versus those of the survivor of the alleged crime. Milligan asks us to consider whether there is another way of gaining the truth without re-traumatising the victim/survivor? We are told that the Victorian Law Reform Commission is considering this question, among others, in its review of improving the response of the justice system to sexual offences. In the mix of reforms is a new approach of “restorative justice”, but there are serious reservations about its efficacy given it involves the victim/survivor facing their accused/perpetrator in the same space, where the power-imbalance is stark and still not alleviated.

One suggested way forward is for survivor/witnesses to have access to legal support in the form of their own legal representation in the trial process. However, many legal counsel and judicial officers are against this as they believe it compromises the presumption of innocence, the burden of proof, the public nature of the proceeding, the accused’s position in the eyes of the law… But as Milligan reminds us:

The complainant can be absolutely forgiven for thinking that the system is comprehensively stacked against them. (367)

Milligan does not evade her own experience of being called as a witness. She describes her heightened anxiety and panic from unreasonable documentation requests at short notice from the defence team for George Pell. Like Paris Street, Milligan was also brutally cross-examined by Robert Richter QC – the transcript of her cross-examination shows various undermining, offensive and discriminatory tactics being used by the defence. She describes feeling so “alone” in all of this despite her continual acknowledgement that, unlike other witnesses, she had a legal team supporting her. Rather than engaging in self-pity for her own predicament, she highlights the profound unfairness for the multitudes of victims who do not have the means or access to legal support that she was able to receive – they each sit utterly alone and unprotected in the witness box.

Towards the end of her book, Milligan is having a heart-to-heart moment with Peter Morrissey. It is here that she opens the wound of her experience as a witness:

the only thing in my life that was as bad as that day was when my first husband died. And I had to go and identify his body at the morgue. (372)

This is an astonishing statement from a seasoned investigative journalist we have come to know as courageous, sharp and tough. If the current system can retraumatise a journalist like Louise Milligan in this visceral way, we can only imagine the depth of damage to survivors. Witness takes a strong stance and calls this out as an injustice against survivors, and one which undoubtedly, needs to be changed.
 
 
ANGELA COSTI is a freelance writer with a community-engaged practice. She is a graduate of both Law and Professional Writing and Editing. She has worked as a lawyer in the local government and in the social justice sectors. The author of five poetry collections, nine produced plays and a community textbook. Her recent chapbook is Adversarial Practice (Cordite Poetry Review, 2024) and her recent book is An Embroidery of Old Maps and New (Spinifex Press, 2021). Her forthcoming book, The Heart of the Advocate is due out in March 2025 with Liquid Amber Press.

Deborah Pike reviews The Great Undoing by Sharlene Allsopp

The Great Undoing

by Sharlene Allsopp

Ultimo Press

ISBN: 9781761151668

Reviewed by DEBORAH PIKE

 
 

Sharlene Allsopp’s debut novel, The Great Undoing, has a great cover that undoes history with a red crayon. Ernest Scott’s A Short History of Australia (1916) is struck out and bold typeface declares an angry and urgent call for a different version to be told. As Allsopp writes, ‘After all, only the winners write history.’ The ‘story stealers’ (1) have already written theirs, clearly, the time is ripe for a re-write.

I looked up Scott’s book, with some curiosity, to find virtually no information except advertising from antique bookshops via eBay. And now I am assailed by emails and popups, recommending Scott’s volume for purchase. But how long can these versions of history last, I wonder?

As more and more First Nations writers confront questions of representation, voice, colonisation and sovereignty, previous stories and histories of Australia will need to be thrown into question. History, it seems, is being rewritten by First Nations authors like Sharlene Allsopp, Claire G Coleman, and Alexis Wright – via fiction. Fiction has become the space for dismantling empire and for writing and rewriting history into an imaginary place or into a speculative future.

The Great Undoing is set some time, decades ahead, where the world is run by a technology called BloodTalk. Allsopp writes, ‘Everything that we are is stored in our body’ (17). Initially an immunity tool, it is soon used to track people and their locations as well as their bank accounts; it becomes a form of border control.

But the future is not all bleak, certain things are being rectified: Australia has its first Indigenous Prime Minister, ‘Ruby Walker’ who ‘enacts the Truth Telling Policies’ (34). Scarlet, an Australian refugee is tasked with the job of updating the archives and going through curricula to make sure that these are more historically balanced and that more voices are heard, presumably in a way that includes and details Indigenous stories, names and languages.

The novel flashes back and forth from Then to Now. While Scarlett is working in London, she forms a passionate relationship with a rock musician, Dylan. But there is a widespread mass blackout and a breakdown in communications. Everything is in chaos and borders are shut. Scarlet then meets David and they both travel, seemingly illicitly, across the globe to return to Australia, each for a different reason. Scarlet resorts to paper and pen to recount her experience of her ‘great undoing.’ All she has to write on is a copy of Scott’s A History.

But what is Scarlet undone by? Is it the great global technological disaster itself? Or Empire that stripped her of her story? Or is she ‘undoing’ Empire through her truth-telling work? She writes, ‘My father’ – a Bundjalung man – ’was my great undoing’ (25). Is his racial identity the source of her undoing? Or, later, we might ask, is she ‘being undone,’ in a steamy way – as she narrates her romantic encounters with poetic, scintillating prose: ‘[h]e was undoing. I was undoing. And, right then, right now’(67)?

Allsopp suggests that Scarlet’s undoing lies in all of these things, but ultimately, however, it is the undoing of identity, the pursuit of it, that sweeps the story along; the book is a meditation on both the complexity of identity and the nature of textuality – and their interwoven relationship.

In parts, the novel reads like a response to Wiradjuri author, Stan Grant’s brilliant, (if somewhat controversial) essay On Identity (2019). In his book-length essay, Grant argues against the limiting categories of identity – ‘Identity does not liberate, it binds,’(43) explaining that ‘[t]hat’s the problem with identity boxes: they are not big enough to hold love’ (19). He Writes:

If I mark yes on that identity box, then that is who I am; definitively, there is no ambiguity. I will have made a choice that colour, race, culture, whatever these things are… (25)

The result is that by ticking that box, he denies the other parts of his identity which do not fit into that box, ‘we participate in an infinity of worlds’(24), says Grant, citing Alberto Melucci, which such boxes cannot possibly contain. In a similar vein, Allsopp writes:

There have always been tiny, neat boxes to tick. Nationality Box, ethnicity box, gender box, religion box. If you tick or cross you are contained within that box. (195)

Grant attributes his influences to many writers of all colours and persuasions, insisting that many writers are Aboriginal (48), even if their genetic code would tell you otherwise, because (quoting Edouard Glissant),‘“you can be yourself and the other”’ (43) and this is what literature allows us to do. . Allsopp is also interested in showing her indebtedness, her connectedness, to a wide range of writers such as David Malouf, Rebecca Giggs, Claire G Coleman, Christos Tsiolkas and, even J. R. R. Tolkien, among others, all of whom she refers to in her book and occasionally quotes.

Arguably, however, in its attempt to reclaim Indigenous language, storytelling and identity, Allsopp’s main literary influence is that of Tara June Which and her novel The Yield, which Allsopp explicitly mentions. This is because, for Allsopp, as for Winch, language is crucial:

Language isn’t just a tool to share information or to record history. Expressed thought is powerful. It declares truths that are, and truths that are not-yet. Language breathes power into discourses of liberation AND oppression, both creating and destroying futures. (105)

Since language shapes our perception of truth, or ‘frames’ it as Scarlet tells us, it is directly linked to history, and to her job of setting it right. This is a challenge when so many Indigenous languages have been lost. In an insightful (and amusing) discussion of the power of language, Scarlet warns us that much language is used and has been used mistakenly, to wield forms of control, however unconsciously in so many ways: ‘Our language frames us all with penis-envy,’ but when considering its marvellous capacities, ‘It should be vagina-envy, baby.’

Truth telling is also central to the novel’s concerns. But this is not straightforward, ‘When a nation is built on a lie, how can any version of its history be true?’ (119). Allsopp is deeply interested in how truth can be conveyed through narrative, even hinting that there lies the possibility for multiple and perhaps even conflicting ‘truths.’

The Great Undoing examines the ways that narrative structures our perception of both cultural artifacts and the world around us. It exposes the rotten imperial core of major museums and institutions, and gloriously imagines, however briefly, how all this might be remedied. The novel is interspersed with historical tracts and extracts; it is highly experimental fiction, and robustly formally inventive. It is in some ways a narratological compendium, exploring different forms of textuality – in a bid, perhaps, to showcase the breathtaking heterogeneity of various versions of ‘truth’ and history.

In terms of style, the writing is refreshing, bracing and often affecting. Allsopp combines high literary elements with aspects thriller and romance. This genre-bending attests to the possibilities of narrative – and to the difficulty of containing or accommodating certain stories and fractured histories. It could have been the limitations of this reviewer, but at times, I found The Great Undoing difficult to follow.

Despite this reservation, The Great Undoing is exciting reading and it is a pleasure to encounter fiction that is so ambitious, conceptually intellectual, and yet at the same time, also thoroughly immersive. This is an important book.

The novel’s sense of urgency is compelling:

But what if no one tells our stories? What if there are no records left? Can they live on if they only exist in our memories? What if everything I have ever done, every truth I have ever retold, is erased? (169)

Allsopp wants to right the wrongs of the past, reclaim memory, unravel the mystery of identity, throw a tin of paint on the face of history, nudge to possibility – convey the complexity of all these things – as well as give us a rollicking good adventure. Who can ask for more?

Citations

S. Allsopp. The Great Undoing. Sydney: Ultimo Press, 2024.
S. Grant. On Identity. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2019.
 
 
DEBORAH PIKE is a writer and academic based in Sydney and an associate professor of English Literature at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney. Her books include The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald, which was shortlisted for the AUHE award in literary criticism. The Players, her debut novel is now out with Fremantle Press.

Katie Hansord reviews The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat by Sara M Saleh

The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat

Sara M Saleh

UQP 2023

Reviewed by KATIE HANSORD
 
 
 
 
How to begin to do justice to reviewing a book of poetry this important, this powerful, and in this moment? If I were to recommend one book to people this year, it would be this. And it has been. I have told everyone I know.

As Edward Said has written, for Palestinians, “… they could never be fit into the grand vision…Zionism attempted first to minimize, then to eliminate, and finally, all else failing, to subjugate the natives.” (Said, 85). Sara M. Saleh is a powerful award winning writer, human rights lawyer, poet, “the daughter of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Egyptian migrants…based on Bidgigal land” (n pag). Saleh’s writing, reminds us again of Said’s point, her Instagram bio adding to this impressive list of occupations that she is an ‘agent of chaos’ (according to the ‘Israeli’ ambassador). Whatever kind of order would seek to eliminate any of us, I believe requires our opposition, and in its limited view, chaos, if that means the very existence of life-affirming exceptions to its brutal “vision”.

I think firstly though, maybe we must return to the question of what poetry is, because really poetry is a part of everybody, it is for everybody, and it holds such incredible power to inspire new worlds of creativity and imagination. A portal to something beyond that sits already within us. Still, I so often see people feel intimidated, or dismissive, and / or put off by it. And when I say everybody should read this beautiful book of Sara M Saleh’s incredible debut collection of poetry, I truly mean it. Everybody should have it read to them if not, should have the chance to love it and feel its love. I have easily fallen in love with this little book, from its warm peachy-coloured cover and beautiful woman bathing calmly in a teacup, right to its final page. I already want to read it again.

Last night, one of my teenage sons came into my bedroom to chat, and we got onto the subject of poetry because he knows it interests me. I said that I felt poetry was like undiluted cordial in comparison to say a novel; much more intense. “Nobody drinks undiluted cordial you maniac!’ he said, and we were laughing. I concede that I didn’t really think this metaphor through… then I said, perhaps it’s a bit like like how people feel astrology is somehow ‘fake’ somehow a lie or trick, not scientific, but either way it clearly offers us a way in to understanding and speaking and thinking about our own growth and our inner and outer experiences, poetry can do that too in a connected way through someone else’s experiences. Then he said he finds ‘themes’ as a concept the least appealing of the trilogy of plot, character, and themes, the expected elements in a story, and themes are the all of poetry it seems. I say there are many stories and characters in poetry anyway…and so he allows me to read him one poem, from this book.

I choose the final one, ‘Love Poem to Consciousness’ (‘A love poem?’ he looks quite wary. ‘Yes’, I smile, ‘but don’t worry – it’s to consciousness’) …he nods and I read:

I have dreamt of Jenin and her groves,
the figs and orchards, almonds and apricots,
the olives that ripen and ricochet between fingers.

I have wedged and waded my palms
through the soil, marinating in its wetness
the rivers of olive oil spouting even in drought.

I have grazed the Central Highlands of al-Khalil
where the ravines roll and rise,
the terracotta terraces kiss the vineyards,
dark grape hyacinths panting,
the cicadas’ wings glimmering like broken glass.

I have tracked down the oldest soap
factory in Nablus, one of two remaining,
a rush of milky rivers, baches of bars froth
into a foamy afternoon.

I have stepped onto the cobblestones
of al-Naserah, of prophecies and freshwater
spring, plumes of sacrament smoke
Strangle the indigo dusk.

I have gazed at the crystalline waters of Akka,
Felt the sting of salt puffy on my
lips, where I drank the undulating
ocean, and it drank me back.

I know this now, my being contracts and expands
with the land, boundless.
I know this, too: If ancestral homeland
gets me killed someday,
I’ll die like our trees, standing up.
(100)

My son does enjoy this poem – how could anybody not? It is clearly bursting with magic (perhaps another name for love, or life) after all. The final lines conjure for him the image of a pirate he had heard of, shot down, but still standing upright somehow, in defiance even of gravity itself.
The next day I woke to randomly discover a snippet of an interview by Kate Bush, an old interview from Irish television and her words struck me: “Most of my other inspiration comes from people, people are full of poetry you know, everything they say. Maybe the way they say it has its magic, all sparkly. And people are always saying things that inspire me. I mean, people are just full of wonderful things.” (Kate Bush, 25 March 1973, interviewed by Gay Byrne on the late late show.)

It resonated so heart-breakingly, with an image I had shared months ago, written much more recently this year, it was pink text on a paler pink-coloured background that was unattributed. It read:

“They’re killing poets, and not just the ones we know about.
The children who told the best jokes, the grandmothers with the funniest nonsense songs, the fathers with the turn of phrase to break your heart.
The archives replete with the words of the ancestors, now in ash.
Thousands of stories lost to the ether.
They’re killing the storytellers. And they’re doing it on purpose.”

What a thing for a heart to have to hear…

Stories connect our hearts and we know that Sara M Saleh is a brilliant storyteller, as well as a poet. Her novel Songs for the Dead and the Living was amazingly also published in 2023, in a prolific burst of gifts, the same year as The Flirtation of Girls, which is no exception, full of story, and characters, and yes, themes too.

Her use of words to convey all of these is so skilful and creative and brilliantly done, I am not sure how to show it. In the poem ‘Reading Darwish at Qalandia Checkpoint’ just this one tiny section alone demonstrates her incredible talent and wit and power as a writer:

Police investigation still pending.
The evidence – REDACTED
His rights – REDACTED
His childhood – REDACTED
(20)

There is a story here, and it is one of negation and terrible harm. A character too. But what does it mean to speak this? To show us, in the very struck out words, what has been redacted and to tell us yes, in all caps, yes – it very much has been? It somehow undoes a part of this harm, undoes its very future, as it unveils a part of what has been intentionally taken, hidden, suppressed, and it shows us how we might be able to witness and then speak back to that. Reimagine the very existence of an imperialist colonising violence… A childhood, unquestionably, should not under any circumstance be struck out or redacted! This will catch you in the heart, like it should. The poem concludes:

I flip through the pages of
my book. Reading Darwish at Qalandia
is a provocation.
I confront the bare Iron grids,
they are bone waiting for skin,
the toothed bars not wide enough
to squeeze a single orange in.
(21)

To even read poetry, here the poetry of Darwish, in such a context is a provocation. Like the final lines of ‘Love Poem to consciousness’ it is impossible to not confront:

I know this now, my being contracts and expands
with the land, boundless.
I know this, too: If ancestral homeland
gets me killed someday,
I’ll die like our trees, standing up.
(100)

Faced with confrontations of the most unjust and horrific death, of horrors seemingly unimaginable, as well as the knowledge of so much love and beauty in our hearts, I suppose some people also feel poetry is somehow a trivial response, somehow just a frivolity in the real fight against oppression or the deep appreciation of nature, life, humanity. This, Sara M Saleh’s The Flirtation of Girls reminds us, is simply not the case. Her poetry is about our very humanity, all of our humanity, it is life affirming, a powerful part of remembrance, for grief, and therefore love, and a powerful way for us all to imagine the world we need to exist into being. It is utterly crucial. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, it is stunningly brilliant. Saleh is a truly incredible poet and this is an astonishing debut that everyone should read.
 
 
Citation
Said, Edward W. The question of Palestine. Vintage, 1992.
 
 
KATIE HANSORD is a writer and researcher living in Naarm. Her PhD was completed at Deakin University. Her research interests include gender, poetry, feminism, disability justice, decolonisation and anti-imperialism.

Isabel Howard reviews Dirt Poor Islanders by Winnie Dunn

Dirt Poor Islanders

by Winnie Dunn

Hachette

ISBN 978-0733649264

Reviewed by ISABEL HOWARD
 
 
Intercultural struggle is the main question at hand in Winnie Dunn’s Dirt Poor Islanders: how do you define yourself between two different cultures that shape every aspect of your life? Dunn’s novel is written from the perspective of Meadow, a young, mixed-race Tongan and white girl growing up in Mt Druitt in the Western suburbs of Sydney and traces her gradual assertion of who she is as she becomes a young woman. With a liberal peppering of millennial Australian and Tongan cultural references it explores themes of girl and motherhood, sexuality and poverty. But at its crux, it provides an internal viewpoint for readers to witness Meadow’s evolution from rejection of herself and all things Tongan, to understanding where she belongs between two cultures and racial identities, and within the complex map of her family.

Built around Meadow’s gradual growth and self-acceptance, the novel adopts the arc of a bildungsroman, and is split into four sections: Soil, Bark, Salt and Blood. At the start of each section, we’re greeted by a written retelling of a traditional Tongan story, such as the story of Va’epopua at the start of Soil:

The lagoon stretched further and so too did the demi-god. From coral to seaweed to salt to wave – it became clearer to him that everything emerged in pairs. Somehow, he knew that he could not be made of woman alone. So, when the demi-god’s calves became as wide as stumps, he questioned his grounded mother yet again. ‘I am made from what?’

Slowly planting taro with her stiff knuckles and gnashing inside her cheeks, Va’epopua whispered, ‘Different.’(4)

Each of these retellings foreshadows its respective section, like the parallel in this excerpt between Meadow’s mixed racial identity and Va’epopua’s son’s parentage. By using and repeating particular Tongan phrases and motifs in these retellings, Dunn alludes to a long-lived oral history and a set of values that differ from dominant Western ideas held in Australia, and she weaves connections to these retellings throughout the story as important symbols of Tongan identity, such as childbirth, soil, and Tongan foods. In fact, the whole novel is a collection of experiences laden with meanings and lessons that help Meadow make sense of her identity, emulating the nature of oral storytelling as a means of transmitting history and values.

At first, I felt that this structure meant that the story lacked a momentum I’ve come to expect from Australian fiction, in that it was missing a central conflict or mystery to drive the plot. However, as Matthew Salesses’s explains in Craft in the real world, “causation in which the protagonist’s desires move the action forward” (27) has been dictated by dominant Western ideologies of literature as the hallmark of effective fiction, leading us to undervalue traditions that have priorities other than a story’s start or end (98). Thinking about this made me realise that it was my expectation that was lacking: Dunn’s work doesn’t offer a denouement of practical solutions to Meadow’s problems because it rejects this Western storytelling vehicle in favour of a form that resembles cyclical storytelling. It emphasises understanding and interconnectedness and, basing my knowledge in Dunn’s retellings, it engages with the essence of Tongan storytelling traditions. It’s an innovative choice, and its delicate execution marks Dunn as both an original and skilled writer in the Australian landscape.

Beyond structure, Dunn centres Tongan-Australian experiences through just about every aspect of the novel. She provides nuanced representations of Tongan-Australian people, spaces, language and kinship, suffused with so much detail and feeling that her lived experience shines through, as seen in careful details like these:

My grandmother stepped out, dressed in an entirely new outfit – a shimmery puletaha with gold embroidery. Holey ta’ovala around her waist. Ta’ovala was funny like that; the poorer it looked, the richer it was, because it meant the garment had been passed down for generations. (206)

But Dunn resists one-sided glorification to represent the complexity of Tongan-Australian culture in full. She underscores the strong bonds between Tongan people and their “togetherness,” (40) but doesn’t shy away from how those bonds can become problematic, such as how Meadow’s family expects her aunt to sacrifice her intimate relationship with a woman for the sake of their traditions (163). As a woman personally living these experiences, in a country where Tongan people are plagued by negative stereotypes, I’m certain that this is a challenging step for Dunn. But by taking it with care, she’s created an earnest picture of what it means to be Tongan in Australia: the beauty and the ‘dirt’.

By being selective and sparing in how she explains Tongan culture and language, Dunn is unapologetic about prioritising a Tongan-Australian audience and making them the cultural insiders of Dirt Poor Islanders. For those who aren’t cultural insiders, this could make the novel an occasionally alienating experience – some might even argue that the lack of explanations, or the lack of provision for cultural outsiders, prevents them from identifying with Meadow and takes them out of the flow of the story. However, Dunn has made her choice clear, and I would argue that, in a publishing industry where this is the very first novel written for a Tongan-Australian audience, it adds significant value for cultural insiders that would be diminished by catering to the white gaze. Rudine Sims Bishop explained that seeing ourselves represented is a powerful and validating experience, and it’s just as important to be exposed to the experiences of others – a statement I take to mean as that, for some readers, being made to feel like an outsider by Dunn’s work is a good thing.

As someone who isn’t Tongan nor speaks Tongan, I did occasionally get thrown by Dunn’s frequent Tongan references. Upon reflection, though, I realised that this kind of partial understanding is also a common mixed race, or ‘third culture kid’, experience that I can identify with: growing up surrounded with a mix of cultures and languages, I was often in situations where I didn’t understand the words or references around me. It’s a common, isolating experience that Dunn teaches and encourages readers to empathise with by presenting it through Meadow, who partially understands everything herself.

In a similar vein, Dunn explores racial identity for mixed race and Tongan people in Australia with sensitive accuracy. Racism is the very first thing we see Meadow experience: her white neighbour yells racist abuse at Meadow’s Tongan grandmother, causing Meadow to decide to never work with her on a ngatu again (10) and sparking her association of being Tongan with dirt and muck (112). Further on, there are frequent references to Meadow or others wanting to be pālangi (50), and accusations that Meadow is not Tongan enough: ‘Me and Nettie steered clear of proper Islander girls when we met them at Sunday school in the halls of Tokaikolo. Those mohe ‘ulis demanded we spoke Tongan too, and when we failed, they mocked us. Together, Tongans were always trying to prove how real or fake each of us were. Nettie and me, we were plastic.’ (89)

With passages like this, Dunn draws attention to the ways in which we racialize people based on their cultural or linguistic knowledge and language. She shows how external messages can influence one’s racial identity and foster internalised racism, in that Meadow initially hates being Tongan, but also defines herself ‘as half and never enough, hafekasi’ (271). But to rebut the often harmful assumption that these feelings might be intrinsic or inevitable, Dunn presents us with Meadow’s rage at the injustice of racist stereotypes during class (141) and, eventually, her realisation that she can define herself differently: ‘No one could live as half of themselves. To live, I needed to embrace Brown, pālangi, noble, peasant, Tonga, Australia – Islander.’ (275)

Dunn actively rejects the ways in which Tongan and mixed-race people are stereotyped and made to feel less than their counterparts in Australia, and it’s this aspect of her writing that I’m most grateful for. Many of Meadow’s experiences and feelings are reflected in my own life as a mixed-race Filipino-Australian woman, and it’s refreshing to not just see those experiences on the page, but to see how Dunn presents them as steps in a journey of understanding oneself.

There’s plenty more to examine in Dirt Poor Islanders, such as sexuality, motherhood, and family violence. But in the interest of writing about what I know and what I believe to be the heart of Dunn’s novel, I’ve focused on her exploration of race and culture. Despite the differences between being Tongan and Filipino, reading Dunn’s work felt like slipping on a well-worn t-shirt in how empathetically she writes growing up not-quite-white in Australia. It’s a generous, powerful debut novel, narrated with a vulnerable voice, and much like Meadow’s many mother figures, it challenges its readers while fostering love and understanding.
 

Citations

Salesses, Matthew. Craft in the real world. Catapult, 2021.
Bishop, Rudine Sims. “Windows and Mirrors: Children’s Books and Parallel Cultures.” 14th Annual Reading Conference 1990, California State University, 5 March 1990, pp. 3-12, files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED337744.pdf#page=11.

 
ISABEL HOWARD(she/her) is a Filipino-Australian writer based in Lutruwita / Tasmania. Her creative work has appeared in kindling & sage, and she is currently in her Honours year studying creative writing at the University of Tasmania.

Gan Amin reviews Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

Kairos

by Jenny Erpenbeck

translated by Michael Hofmann

ISBN 9781783786121

Granta

Reviewed by GAN AINM
 
 
 
 
It’s hard to avoid the idea of allegory when approaching Jenny Erpenbeck’s International Booker Prize-winner, Kairos. Right from the cover, we are told by Neel Mukherjee that ‘Erpenbeck has written an allegory for her nation, a country that has ceased to exist— East Germany’. The Booker Prize’s own website asks us to consider the merits of reading Kairos allegorically, and most reviews will come down on one side or the other regarding the device’s efficacy.

The story of Hans and Katharina, two East German citizens in the latter years of the state, begins at a moment of, seemingly, good fortune; a chance meeting on a bus in which passions are ignited and an affair ensues. The novel itself, however, begins long after this, when Katharina hears of Hans’ death and begins to sift through boxes of letters, diaries, notes and other refuse of their relationship. Hans is a former Hitler Youth, current writer, and married with a child. Katharina, far younger, was a member of the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation, a socialist youth group collective designed to uphold the values of East Germany. Hans wields a patriarchal authority over Katharina, as well as, via his several affairs, his wife and child. He is well-travelled and learned, and his experience of life before (and beyond) the wall lends him an autocratic propensity that he wields culturally, familially, and sexually. There is, then, from this initial kairos, or ‘critical moment’, of their meeting, a disparity between the two lovers, one reflective of those between East Germany and its citizens. The GDR was the socialist-controlled portion of Germany following the end of WWII. To maintain order and prevent dissent, the government placed restrictions on the freedoms and movements of its citizens to travel to the capitalist West Germany over the Berlin Wall. By the late 80s, when the pair meet, they are living in a failing state, where the tensions spawned by government overreach would soon cause its complete (and in the case of the Wall, literal) collapse.

The novel makes this allegory clear through its explicit positioning of the personal and political:

Up and down. End of season sales, says her cousin. Bargain basement prices. Words Katharina needs to learn. She tries to remember what she was taught in civics about the difference between use value and exchange value. // And not once does the phone ring. // Is Hans sleeping with his wife on their vacation? Up and down, up and down, until everything that’s for sale is practically given away.
(p. 77)

Step by step, Katharina measures herself against her state, which has been generous to her and now counts on her to be generous in return. // Did he give himself up to her, or she to him? Or, if love is serious, are they indistinguishable?
(p. 86, 98)

The same can be said of the novel’s conspicuous allusions to walls:

Before they head out again, Katharina sees a photo of Hans on the desk. Can I have that? she asks, and Hans asks back: As a wall to contain imagination? (p. 30)

The immediacy with which these comparisons and references are made (being set up and paid off within a few pages if not the same paragraph) can sometimes work against the novel and reveal the limitations of a simple A = B, B = A comparison. However, I mention the debate around the novel’s allegorical reading up front in order to posit that Kairos is in fact far more interesting than the elevator pitch version of its premise; it is evident that the majority of Erpenbeck’s actual compositional choices point towards something at once broader and deeper.

Tension and unease is baked into Erpenbeck’s writing. The lack of clear subjects and verbs throughout the novel’s persistent use of sentence fragments leaves the reader dependent on their surrounding context, perhaps reflecting not just the young Katharina’s dependence on Hans, but the dependence of both upon the state. The use of run-on sentences speaks to a similar kind of reliance, this time the need for those in power to connect dots, draw conclusions, stoke suspicions; their frenzied amalgamation and need to reach and infiltrate everything is a kind of paranoia based in the fear of the agency of others, and the possibility for freedoms to undermine the (im)balance of power. Control is the shared element of these two seemingly incongruous techniques, and it is a control wielded by Hans as well as (and because of) the GDR.

Having lived through its creation, Hans sees the socialist utopia (and, because he is the one betraying his wife, the affair) as generative. It is not a preconditioned, or in any way stable, S/state, but a system which requires maintenance, regulation, continual reassertion and the quelling of potential threats to its stability. Such betrayals take the form of infidelities (against him) which engender ever greater controls that limit the freedom of dissidents. What Katharina’s affair-within-an-affair seems to represent for Hans, then, is the fear of her freedom, of her agency in moving beyond imposed bounds and barriers, and a choice in where her loyalty, her love, her body, can lie. As with all betrayals by combatants, there are punishments, and in her reaction to these, we again see the infusion of the personal and political, with Katharina initially reluctant to cross the Berlin Wall to the (comparatively) free and capitalist West. These sharp psychological observations shine through, and indeed create a powerful parallel between the troubled lovers and the collapse of East Germany, and yet Erpenbeck pushes her writing further.

There is a conspicuous and purposeful lack of speech marks throughout the dialogue, and even occasions when dialogue is not laid out traditionally:

Well, says Hans, I can’t swim. Why’s that? The water was too cold for me. Katharina shakes her head, disbelievingly. Really? she asks. And he replies: No, not really.
(p. 57)

This technique may again point towards the idea of control and the compelled language of totalitarian states; arranging the dialogue as we would a traditional paragraph seems to take away the agency of what is being said. However, it may also represent a kind of finality, or perhaps inevitability, and this may be the book’s most devastating decision.

If speech here is not granted a special, interventionist category, via speech marks, then these are not assertions being injected into the world, but solidified, spatio-temporally fixed elements of the world. They are past, no different in kind from the scenery or sensorial recollections of a now-defunct nation, recalled in imperfect fragments by the frame narrative. This device, where we find an older Katharina reflecting back with a general lack of the dependent fragments, furthers this conclusiveness with a perspective of birds-eye omniscience:

It feels good to be walking beside him, she thinks. // It feels good to be walking beside her, he thinks.
(p. 19)

He thinks, as long as she wants us, it won’t be wrong. // She thinks, if he leaves everything to me, then he’ll see what love means. // He thinks, she won’t understand what she’s agreed to until much later. // And she, he’s putting himself in my hands. // All these things are thought on this evening, and all together they make up a many-faceted truth.
(p. 27)

This all-knowing perspective, like the other devices here, speaks towards a certitude, to what is doomed to happen within an imbalanced relationship from the instant of their meeting; that critical moment contains within it a ‘good fortune [which] implied always [a] misfortune that was not just equal and opposite, but in its potential for harm, perhaps even much greater’, where ‘anything seems possible, anything good, everything bad’ (p. 91, 117).

To speak briefly of Michael Hofmann’s English translation of these techniques and themes, the aforementioned devices are all preserved effectively and reverentially. Other moments, however small, seem to take more liberties; it’s difficult to see, for example, how the line “that strange word ‘believe’, with ‘lie’ in it, is still going through her head when he has pulled down the straps of her dress” could maintain its specific wordplay (and implication) in the original German (p. 46). While this might seem pedantic, I mention it only for those with the capacity to read this text in its original language.

Erpenbeck’s book is crushingly absolute. It is tinged not just with the finality with which a memory is remembered, or a fragment recollected, but the finality that reveals the inevitable, and within the inevitable lies the inherent. Power imbalances do not become manipulative and abusive, but are abusive, always and already; they require a monopoly on agency, increasing coercions and restrictions on freedom lest the authority be challenged, or abandoned.

Everything in Kairos seems to speak towards this certitude, but it is hard to see the novel as defeatist. If the book does indeed function as an allegory, then it is, like all allegories, a warning, and an act of defiance. A warning cannot be for ‘a state that has ceased to exist’. It can only be for a potential, a future, dare we say a present, one in which there opens up the chance to heed the warning; to do, to act, to be, better.
 
GAN AINM is a writer born, raised and living in Lutruwita/Tasmania, currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Tasmania, and whose fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Island Magazine, and received second place in the University of Essex Wild Writing Prize.

Lindsay Tuggle

Lindsay Tuggle is the author of The Afterlives of Specimens (2017), which was glowingly reviewed as a cover feature in The New York Review of Books, American Literature (Duke UP) and American Literary History (Oxford UP). Her debut poetry collection, Calenture (2018), was one of The Australian’s Books of the Year, shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature’s Mary Gilmore Award and Australian Poetry’s Anne Elder Award. Her work has been supported by numerous international grants, including the prestigious Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress, and a Travelling Fellowship from the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2023, Lindsay was a Writer-in-Residence at Château d’Orquevaux in France and Bundanon Trust in the Shoalhaven of Australia.

Read more at http://www.lindsaytuggle.com
 
 

The Arsonists’ Hymnal 

Our story starts in the field
and ends in the bath

          or vice versa.

I can no longer remember when things came full circle,
when our endings and beginnings began 

to eat their own tales.
In the middle, there is fire.

Summer was not yet the vast,
burning thing it has become.

Arson is a form of prophecy.

Flames have tongues, and so do we—
whether we use them or not.

The fires were warning us,
          all this time.

No one believes a prophet,
          until it’s too late.

That night, we lay on the grass,
watching for heat lightening.

We cannot sleep without seeing
that jagged rupture in the sky,

a tangle of stars and satellites
discernible only by blinking proximity.

After the lightening
our adolescent
poison quickens, then recedes.

After, we sleep.
But not tonight.

Tonight, we speak again in our mother tongue,
a dual fluency we alone share.

At first, we don’t hear the shift.
Slippage is like that, both sudden and gradual.

They forced it from us long ago
          or so it seemed.

We remember the doctors’ creeping hands
          encircling our throats,

probing the wet insides of our mouths.

A needle.      A parade of arms.

Slowly, we learned to speak
the Queen’s tongue.

We forgot to remember
the poem unfurling 

in the air between my sister and I,
the slow dance of our exhalations.

Then,
at thirteen,

a murmuration escaped.

Our bodies begin
to stretch and swell.

Our marrow aches.
We are always hungry.

Games over who can eat more, or less,
then dance til exhaustion.

Our limbs crave sleep,
but are too long for our narrow beds.

So we lay in the field,
waiting for the heat to break into light.

We didn’t set the fire.
Not with our hands.

We dreamed of burning for so long,
at last the lightening answered our call.

We lay still as the grass flumed ever closer,
let the dying embers kiss our skin.

In our secret tongue, we agreed
to remain, unmoving, 

to let the ending write itself.

Did we wake in the bath

or the grave?

I can no longer recall

which of us resides underground.

Oracles and fire-eaters share fatal tendencies.
It is a dangerous business, prophecy.

Paralysis is innate, in the face of extinction.
Fawn response on a global scale.

When ashes fall from your mouth,
remember, you asked for this.

Swallow hard,      sister.
One last time.

 

Anisha Bhaduri

Anisha Bhaduri is a writer from Kolkata, who lives and works in Hong Kong. A Konrad Adenauer Fellow, her journalism has been published across Asia. She has won a British Council prize, has been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and nominated for Best of the Net 2023 for her first short story published in North America and for Best of the Net 2024 for her first work published in the UK. Her literary fiction appeared in She Writes, Random House India. Her debut crime novella Murders in Kolkata 26 was published by Juggernaut Books. Bhaduri’s short stories have appeared or forthcoming in Joyland Magazine, Tampa Review, Harpur Palate, Touchstone Literary Magazine, The Hopper, Sonder Magazine, the other side of hope and Kitaab.

 

Tokelau

On the third day of the Lunar New Year, I noticed Mr Cheong’s eyes were blue. He was sitting with his back to the wall, on a hard chair, his elbows on a collapsible plank of laminated wood that hemmed in a little square patch of the ground floor landing. The glare from the strip of neon overhead lent a hardness to his face. Then the main door to our building opened, and closed, and the lemony light that it brought in and also expelled, cut the neon’s hardness like lightning. And, in that quiet island of colors nudging winter smells, Mr Cheong’s irises had acquired an unmistakable blue.

“Kung he fat Choy!” my son greeted him. 

Ah Cheong grinned, his dentures shone. A muscle quivered on his chin as he wished my son well too. 

“He speaks Chinese?” 

“Reads and writes, too,” I said proudly, ruffling my son’s hair. Drawing an impossible breath that mothers do when it is suggested that their children have it in them to test limits. 

“My grandchildren speak French, only French, they read everything in French. Write in French,” Ah Cheong said deliberately, taking time, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. 

“Here, in Hong Kong?” my son piped up. 

“Oh no, they are in Quebec. They all speak French there, nothing but French.” 

“But Quebec’s in Canada, am I right, Mamma?” 

Drawing another deep breath, I nodded. “Certainly.” 

“Do you speak French, Mr Cheong,” I wanted to know. 

“Oh no, not at all. Maybe I’ll learn when I visit them.” 

The lift arrived and we said our goodbyes.
When we had moved in to this building on a Saturday in May, Mr Cheong was on duty. We had asked our landlady to make introductions. 

“Are you from India?” he wanted to know in fluent English. 

My husband and I exchanged a glance, a fleeting but concrete swell of relief of foreigners at a linguistic loss. 

We nodded happily. 

“From which part?” 

“Calcutta.” 

“Calcutta? You are from Calcutta? I’ve been to Calcutta so many times.” 

I felt a contraction in my chest, a sudden stillness that comes when faced with the very unexpected. Only then I was properly aware of Mr Cheong. In his sky blue uniform shirt, sitting in the corner of a slight elevation from which stairs rose, an overhead fan stirring his white hair, his knuckles swollen and a smile that hid his eyes, almost. 

I regarded this elderly Hongkonger and wondered what had taken him to Calcutta, again and again. What had made this man from an orderly metropolis disregard my city’s sagging heat and general filth? Did he see what I could clearly, that Hong Kong shared Calcutta’s template of conurbation – an unmistakable colonial legacy? 

“I’ve been to Chennai too,” Mr Cheong declared. 

“How so?” now my husband was curious too. 

“I’ve worked on ships. The charters took me around the world. Calcutta, Chennai lovely cities. Great people. Liked it every time.”
There was a bland sincerity that told us Mr Cheong saw no need for curated emphasis. We became friends. 

Mr Cheong was on duty only on Saturdays when he spelled our usual caretaker, also a septuagenarian. Waiting for the lift, I would chat sometimes. He would tell me about his usual place of work, closer home. How he would be rotated sometimes among the buildings that his company was contracted to manage. 

“Good the government now allows more elderly people to work as janitors, security guards and caretakers.” 

I would agree, remembering the piece of news clearly. How reading it had instantly brought to mind Mr Cheong. 

“Hong Kong is so expensive,” he would say, bringing his hands together and rubbing the wrists. “The weather is not good for old people.” 

That January, we had a cold spell. The winds brought tears and humidity hurt our bones. Rooms were fetid with colds on the mend and damp woolens bit into the body like snakes. One Saturday, he waved me over. 

“I read Hong Kong had snow last Sunday. Is it true?” 

“You tell me, Mr Cheong, this is your city,” I smiled, taking a while.  “It was probably frost, nothing more. But it was certainly the coldest day in decades.” 

“What do you think it would happen if it snowed here in Hong Kong?” 

“You tell me, Mr Cheong.”

 “If it snowed and there were icecaps on the sea, and if it all turned white, maybe I could take a picture and send it to my grandchildren.” 

“To Quebec?” 

“Yes, you remembered?” the blue in eyes glittered. 

“But don’t they have enough snow there?” 

“They do, they do, they have plenty. But if I had proof it snowed here in Hong Kong too, maybe they would visit.” 

The lift keened in the pocket of silence. 

I was suddenly seized by an image of Cindy Harlacher from years ago, in blue linen shorts and a dirty white vest, standing still in the shaded part of a terrace on the top floor of a newspaper office in Calcutta I had briefly worked in. In the newsroom, the air-conditioner was spreading a lukewarm apology and it was growing stuffier. I had to step out. 

Cindy’s face was red, her alabaster arms and legs shiny with sweat and mottling slowly. Her blue eyes glittered in disbelief as heat rose from the cracked, weathered cement. It was 42ְ degrees Celsius in the sun. The slight Manitoban with a reddish mop of hair and a shy smile had told us quietly, just the day before, with the contrition of someone who was ready to be doubted in a land where the sun shone year around, that winters in her native Canada could push temperatures down to -30 degrees Celsius, even lower. We had smiled politely. In the height of an Indian summer, when an unrelenting yellow haze settled on the plains and dust spiralled like a madman’s rant, a terrain completely frozen over seemed as improbable as unseasonal rains carried over by damp winds from the Bay of Bengal.   

On the terrace, as someone had called out her name, Cindy had turned around; a sweating bottle of water pressed to the side of her throat. The smile that rippled on her lips arrived moments late, and I recognized the relief of an itinerant. She pressed the cold bottle into the hands of the colleague who had turned up by her side, chatting easily, her manner animated as if she was already crossing into the realm of endless snow and silent nights, the end of her working holiday just a matter of time now.  

I hadn’t thought of Cindy Harlacher since moving to Hong Kong.    

Sometimes, on my way out on errands on Saturdays, I would notice Mr Cheong’s lunch sitting inside a white polythene packet – standard restaurant issue. Two flat, rectangular polystyrene boxes stacked one upon another, nudged by a lidded plastic beaker and disposable chopsticks, the shapes distinct through their polythene shroud; a disposable meal that leaves no aftertaste. 

I saw men and women, even schoolchildren hurrying home at the end of the day, similar polythene bags dangling from their hands. But rarely at lunchtime. At that time of the day, fellow-feeling is greater. Co-workers tend to eat together, creating instant, ersatz families – a curious bond that is defined by the hour of the day and not the people who may have shaped it. 

“Don’t you cook for Mrs Cheong?” I pointed at the takeaway, arms laden with shopping. 

“When’s the time?” 

“Why not? You get off at six, you can shop on your way home. Cook dinner. Don’t know how you can stand takeaway every day,” I rolled my eyes. 

“Well, this is Hong Kong.”
So it is, one restaurant for every 600 people it seemed. He surprised me a few weeks later. “What happened to char siu?” I exclaimed, pointing to a bagel sitting inside a deli carton, ringed by little containers of different hue, rocket leaves peeping out like shy elves. 

“That’s your lunch, Mr Cheong?” 

The smile melted his eyes, and Mr Cheong nodded shyly. “Wanted to try one. The cream cheese tastes good.” 

“But is it filling?” I said, moving my hands vaguely to indicate his usual fare.

 “I once had cheese in Holland, brought some home too. Excellent. But it spoiled in the heat here, the children were very disappointed,” Mr Cheong said with his eyes on a paper napkin he was using to wipe off cream cheese from his chin. 

“You children like cheese?” 

“Oh, yes, they do. But my grandchildren love bagels with cheese. They really do.” 

Between noon and one, the front door of the building would remain shut. With Mr Cheong taking a break, it was up to residents to buzz visitors in. Sometimes, a deliveryman would be at a loss, lingering apologetically. Mr Cheong would materialise, asking his business. And if satisfied, would admit him. 

I asked him once, how did he know it was all right to let in a stranger. He said he didn’t, couldn’t possibly and that it was a gamble, anyway; one just hoped the bad guys would keep away. I laughed with him till nudged by an image of my little son playing on the foyer carpet, all by himself, in the shadow of our closed main door. 

The fragility of it all was splinter sharp and I admonished the elderly caretaker, “You must take it seriously, Mr Cheong. You must.” 

Neel had just started in a new kindergarten and wasn’t settling well. He would cling to me when I went to drop him off and I could hear him wailing long after the class nanny had collected him. There were a few, not unexpected debacles but Ms Lee, his playgroup teacher, was patient. 

She told me it was remarkable that Neel insisted on starting conversations despite having little Chinese and what was even more remarkable that his little classmates seemed willing to absorb familiar words and phrases in foreign tones. Sometimes, Ms Lee said, a few words would even be exchanged. Was that progress? “Oh yes, sure la,” giggled Ms Lee. 

That day, with my son’s little fingers clutching mine, as we walked back home, I asked Neel to point out in Chinese the things that he found interesting. He shook his head, lifting his arms to show he wanted to be carried. 

“What? A five year old? Shame…” I intoned as I picked him up, looked into his dark eyes, smelled the fragrance that flowed only from him and breathed in deeply. 

I regarded our building from the opposite pavement, waiting for the lights to change. The wind was rising and carried the smell of dried seafood along the tramlines. Chinese sausages hung from the rafters and dried fish wrapped in white paper showed their tinsel tails in the shops that lined the road. There was a stink that told you the sea was not far. 

Our 14-storey building with peeling paint and protruding washing rails wouldn’t have been out of place in my native Calcutta where dilapidated block of flats stood confidently in serpentine lanes, braving open sewers and the stench of rubbish. During rains, each building was like an island with water standing irresolute around them. 

There, tenants still paid pre-War rent agreed to by grandfathers long dead and landlords did little or nothing to maintain property they had inherited on paper. It was a tyranny of thrift practised generation after generation, refined, brandished – sometimes in courts – till smart developers took over, if they could. Urban renewal in that city was at the discretion of market forces and musclemen, not municipal officials. No surprise then this ungentrified strip of Hong Kong suited us. 

A visitor from the fancier Mid-levels had once raised an eyebrow as a stevedore stripped down to waist had emerged from the lift pushing crates of dried sea cucumber from the warehouse a floor up. 

“No cargo entrance?” 

“Same lift for all.” 

“Oh, I see,” she said as she lifted the pleats of her saree and wrapped the end around herself tightly. 

Mr Cheong hadn’t impressed her either. 

“You know, people in suits take care of our block of flats,” she said eventually, munching on onion fritters I had prepared Calcutta style, served with piping hot milk tea. 

Our regular watchman, Mr Wong, was an acerbic individual with a long face who relished quarrels with elderly matrons who seemed to be in a majority in our building. 

“That’s why the building is still standing,” one of them once declared angrily in lisping English. “Left to our children, the flats would have been sold off ages ago and we would be forced to live in nursing homes and shoe-box public housing units. I tell them, space matters, shininess doesn’t. But who listens? You tell me, you have a small child, isn’t it better to have more space and pay low rent?” 

I couldn’t disagree but then, she was probably a rent-controlled tenant, with her spacious unit needing repairs and her kitchen and plumbing not upgraded since the 70s. Mr Cheong, who was listening, told us he lived in a public housing estate after languishing on the waitlist for five years and that he paid subsidised rent. 

The graying lady with the fruit shop at the foot of our building probably paid controlled rent too. She regularly harangued buyers, had a reputation for overcharging and selling spotty fruits going soft. But a corner shop had its advantages so she seemed to get by. Sometimes, she would spare a smile which faded the instant she spotted her husband across the street smoking midmorning, without a care. He was the neighbourhood thinker. 

A middle-aged man, dressed in blue jeans complemented alternately by plaid shirts and golf uppers, tails tucked neatly, the creases on his jeans faithfully meeting the laces of his pristine sports shoes; an inevitable cigarette dangling from his fingers, burning bright with every drag. 

He liked to smoke in the company of Mr Cheong when the old man was on duty, both inhaling seriously, unsmiling, their eyes fixed on matters of interest they would shortly begin to comment on. 

Sometimes, I was tempted to gift them packs of cigarettes for the sheer pleasure of watching the two blow perfect, leisurely rings on a Monday morning. But Mr Cheong only worked Saturdays. 

When humidity climbed with the cloying heat, Mr Wong would undo all buttons of his uniform shirt and with fists bunched into pant pockets would walk up and down the lobby with his singlet showing, his sinewy arms curving out of rolled sleeves. He couldn’t stand the thinker and was rumoured to share uncharitable observations with the harmless man’s wife within his earshot. 

Mr Choeng’s mariner mien was manifest in the neatness of his uniform and his blue shirt would always remain buttoned.

“How old are you Mr Cheong?” 

“Guess,” he said and left it at that. 

Sometimes, I thought a Chinese saint would look just like him – a head full of white hair and a face so serene it seemed the sea had sucked all tempest out of him. 

One Saturday, as he handed me a letter from my parents, he wanted to know how frequently I wrote to them or called. He already knew we flew to Calcutta twice a year to visit family. 

“I write to my grandparents in Bangla,” my son said as he snatched the letter from my hands and started to tear the flap open. 

“It’s for him,” I told Mr Cheong. 

“Stamps, stamps!” Neel screamed, jumping up and down in the lobby. 

“Stickers too,” he squealed as treasures tumbled out. He held the letter close to his eyes, inhaling deeply. 

“Nani, Nani,” he pointed at the handwriting of my mother. 

“Dadu, Dadu,” he rubbed a finger on my father’s. 

“He knows?” 

“Oh yes, Mr Cheong,” I laughed, enjoying his incredulity. “He can read and write in Bangla – the language we speak.” 

Mr Cheong leaned back a little and we said our goodbyes.
The Chinese New Year came and went in January and the customary red envelope we had prepared with Mr Cheong’s year-end bonus inside stayed in my handbag. 

“Have you seen Mr Cheong lately?” I asked my husband on a Saturday as I was cleaning out my tote. 

“Not for sometime.” 

“I still have his lai see here,” I dug out the small red envelope and waved it. 

“Still not back from his New Year break?” 

“Let me find out,” I said, pulling on a coat. 

Mr Cheong’s replacement smiled a lot. He had little English. 

“Mr Cheong?” I pointed at the seat the elderly man had just vacated and moved my right hand in a gesture that splayed the fingers and brought the palm upwards. 

“Is… he… still… on… leave?” I took my time with each word. 

“Canada. He go Canada.” 

“To visit?” 

“He go, he go,” the smiling caretaker said. The aged lift screeched behind me as it winched itself up. 

As I walked up the stairs, I thought of Mr Cheong. I saw him in my mind hemmed in by snow in distant Quebec, his grandchildren calling out to him in French, nothing but French; his saint’s face crumbling as the language he spoke to his children was meaningless to theirs. 

And, I thought how he must be missing the sea, its saltiness. 

That evening, I looked up from the newspaper I was reading and called to my son to come to me. Then, with his little hands in mine, I told him about the tiny island nation of Tokelau, a dot in the blue of the Pacific, whose population of 1,403 can only be reached by sea.

 

James Gobbey reviews Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

Pan Macmillan

ISBN: 9781035026074

Reviewed by JAMES GOBBEY
 

If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among those that survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself—which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.
(250)

Dying is individual, but death punctures the social, diffusing its impacts among those that remain. Martyr! then asks: is there meaning to be found in death? What lives on with the people that remain? What makes a martyr?

Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, Martyr!, sees the established Iranian-American poet turn his attention to a new form. His novel asks uncomfortable questions in the name of identity and grief, culminating in a work that attests to the singular devastations that make up collective loss. And yet, despite a fascination with the lingering potential of death, Akbar achieves a lightness that lifts his novel beyond simple pessimism.

Martyr!’s focal character, Cyrus Shams, is surrounded by death. It permeates his life: he works at a hospital, playing sick for medical students to practice counselling the terminal; he is a recovering addict, sure that every day of sobriety is a day of life he should never have seen; he is haunted by the memory of his mother’s murder in the downing of a commercial flight by a US navy cruiser. All of this death culminates in Cyrus’s fixation with, and desire to begin writing on, martyrdom.

The above extract, ruminating on the sins of suicide and the martyr, forms part of Cyrus’s work-in-progress: “BOOKOFMARTYRS.” This book helps structure Akbar’s novel, seeing the inclusion of poetry dedicated to famous martyrs, as well as passages of essayistic prose. These textual interludes feature at the turn of each chapter, alternating to also include transcripts, emails, and further details surrounding the flight on which Roya Shams lost her life. Because, ultimately, it is the ongoing impacts of Roya’s death that drive much of this novel. 

Roya’s death is folded into the missile attack of Iran Air flight 655 by the USS Vincennes in 1988, which resulted in the murder of 290 civilians. The public memory of this attack is a site of contestation between Iran and the United States. In an interview with Nylon, Akbar explains, “When you say the Vincennes incident, people of a certain age will furrow their brows. It’ll sound vaguely familiar, but they won’t remember 290 innocent lives shot out of the sky. I’m fascinated by that. In Iran, they put it on postage stamps. They propagandize it. I’m fascinated by that, too.” The propagandization of flight 655 serves to make the civilians killed into martyrs. Their deaths assert the indiscriminate nature of the United States war machine, particularly when held against the failing memory of the United States public. In the aftermath of the downing of Iran Air flight 655, these deaths are given an ulterior meaning. 

For Cyrus, this moment of tragedy is a starting point. When asked about the kind of book he conceives of “BOOKOFMARTYRS” being, Cyrus explains: 

My whole life I’ve thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was … The difference between 290 dead and 289. It’s actuarial. Not even tragic, you know? So was she a martyr? There has to be a definition of the word that can accommodate her. That’s what I’m after. (75). 

Cyrus initially determines his mother’s death to be without meaning—simply a number among many. And although we must reconcile that Roya’s death is “not legible to empire” (75), this novel expounds a more expansive view of the potential meanings that death can carry. 

Foremost, Martyr! is a novel that takes the individual loss present in mass death and inspects it. Because, on some level, Cyrus is right. How do we feel the difference between 289 and 290 deaths? Rather than succumbing to the generalised negativity of significant loss, this novel takes a step forward to invigorate the connectivity of a single life—one marred by tragedy on a mass scale. 

I purposefully call Cyrus the focal character of this novel. It is a simplification to call him the protagonist—or even the main character. Martyr! uses Cyrus as a centre from which to work outwards, extending from him to offer life and voice to surrounding people and characters. Primarily, these voices belong to family and friends, but genuine martyred lives are also evoked: namely those of Bobby Sands, Bhagat Singh, Hypatia of Alexandria, and Qu Yuan. These martyrs each feature as poetic subjects of “BOOKOFMARTYRS,” their historic deaths speaking to Cyrus’s negotiations with his own time and identity. Bobby Sands, for instance, has a poem written to him that begins: 

there’s a Bobby Sands Street in Tehran

one block over from Ferdowsi Avenue, 

that’s true, Ireland, Iran, interchangeable mythos
(97)

This poem binds Ireland and Iran, recognising their shared suffering at the hands of colonial powers; it draws together Sands and Ferdowsi—a Persian poet whose story is later retold in Martyr!—creating a textual crossroads at which the two meet. Through Cyrus, through his human ties and writing on martyrdom, a world of active social ties is revealed. 

The connectivity of Martyr! rejects the individualism that separates us from others, perpetuating apathy. In Akbar’s novel, the relationships that spring from Cyrus allow us to feel more. Throughout the novel we touch on the real lives of martyrs, but we also encounter Cyrus’s family and friends. We meet Ali, Cyrus’s father, who made ends meet throughout Cyrus’s childhood by working on a chicken farm; Arash, Cyrus’s uncle, whose time in the Iranian army was spent riding through fields of the dying dressed as an angel of death; and it is through chapters and passages such as these that we meet a clearer version of Roya, unaltered by the filter of Cyrus’s faded childhood memories—a woman who reveals, “I never really loved being alive” (145). These affecting connections extend to include others important to Cyrus: his best friend Zee, and the Iranian artist, Orkideh, whose imminent death becomes an art installation. By allowing the presence of this whole network of characters, we become more able to comprehend the dispersal of feeling that takes place when loss occurs. 

Akbar does something vital in his depictions of social connectivity. He allows these characters the use of their own voices, rather than limiting them to the details known by Cyrus. Formally, as the novel shifts between characters, the point-of-view changes from its standard third-person to a more transparent first-person. While Cyrus is the centre through which we come to each of these characters, access to their experiences—their emotions—occurs through their own words. From this use of voice, these characters each come to exist as the centre of their own worlds, not exclusively the periphery of Cyrus’s, establishing the reality of their own personal connections, and a network that expands on and on. 

This connectivity, this network of people who know and feel for each other to varying degrees, is how we come to parse through the distinct losses that make up mass grief. Martyr! does not deal with the problem of mass death—with the difference between 289 and 290—but it does create the space for us to feel the expansiveness of a single death, and from there we can begin to imagine the social impact of death on a large scale. 

The expansive network depicted in Akbar’s debut novel alters how we come to understand the martyr, though perhaps creating more questions than answers. Finishing Martyr! I wonder if connection, if closeness, is one of the ways in which martyrs create meaning in death? Martyrdom does not exist in isolation: it holds meaning because of the life lost, and, crucially, the lives impacted. Cyrus Shams asserts that death, “because it is inevitable, means nothing.” But, death carries weight for those that remain. Grief is a testament to the life that did exist. Death’s inevitability does not necessitate the loss of meaning, rather meaning lives on with those that remain. 

There is also something else buried in claims that death means nothing. Consider the civilian deaths of Iran Air flight 655: the grief felt for the victims; the meaning attributed to their lives; the violence of the US—none of this should be lessened by death’s inevitability. As state sanctioned mass murder continues in Gaza, we cannot say that death means nothing. To disregard the significance of death is to render oppressive systems acceptable, and, ultimately, this undermines the social world that connects us. 

 

Works Cited:

Akbar, Kaveh. Martyr!. Picador, 2024. 

Akbar, Kaveh. “In Martyr! Kaveh Akbar Is Thinking About Eternity.” Interview by Sophia June, Nylon, 2 Feb. 2024, https://www.nylon.com/life/kaveh-akbar-martyr-interview.

JAMES GOBBEY (he/him) is a writer and bookseller from lutruwita/Tasmania. His work has previously been published by Aniko Press and Togatus Magazine.